Comments

I want to somehow describe the feeling I get from playing a game like this. There's a particular pleasant feeling that comes from playing something like this: a tiny, decontextualized piece of game code. Not even an entire moment of game, just this sliver of a piece. You can really suck in every tiny little detail of the experience because it's so constrained, and every insignificant interaction gains a new meaning.

There's a certain eschatology implicit here. All actions can only be used a small # of times, so the life of the system runs out pretty quickly. The enemies run out of moves faster than you do, so you spend the last several turns doing nothing to no effect. Everything dwindles to an entropic zero, and you wind up in a purgatory. So that poses a question that feels very relevant, somehow: do you avoid taking any actions, and let the system stay in its most potential state forever, or do you hasten that system to it's final state?

I feel similarly. This reminds me a lot of some game jam entries for hyped-up game jams. It's a great concept as one segment to what could be a great game. The rest of the game could come along "if there was just a little more time."

Looking at it as a capsule in itself, on its own, it leaves it up to the player to do a lot of the design work the game-maker just didn't have enough time to do: motivation, context, engagement, etc. But there's always hope the game-maker will be able to return to the project and build it into something more robust and closer to completion.